Planning bureau: cabinet has too high expectations of farmer buy-out scheme | Inland

With this large bag of money, the government wants to make a substantial contribution to achieving the nitrogen targets in 2030. Thousands of companies would have to be closed down and it would lead to tens of percent less livestock. “Based on an analysis of 25 years of termination schemes, the PBL concludes in the report Terminating livestock farming – lessons from 25 years of termination schemes that full spending of the budget in the period up to 2030 is hardly imaginable,” according to the Planbureau.

According to the PBL, the analysis shows that in the past livestock farms that participated in voluntary termination schemes together housed a few percent of the Dutch livestock at that time. “The high expectations about cessation of livestock farms do not seem to be based on a systematic understanding of the effects of cessation schemes.”

According to the PBL, there are also various reasons why farmers do not opt ​​for mass farm closures at the moment. The market conditions for a farmer are currently favorable and the environmental policy still needs to be further developed. It also costs a lot of money to buy profitable companies, because their prospects become even better if some of the livestock farms stop.

The PBL prefers not to opt for forced farm closure, as the cabinet wants if too few farmers stop voluntarily, and points out that there is hardly any experience with this. It will then have to be stated per company why expropriation is necessary.

“With nitrogen reduction as the only argument, that seems difficult because there are also alternatives, for example by making technical adjustments or by terminating other companies,” the PBL writes. In addition, these are time-consuming legal proceedings that can take more than ten years to challenge.